Jakob Nielsen: Top Ten New Mistakes of Web Design. "The more users' expectations prove right, the more they will feel in control of the system and the more they will like it. And the more the system breaks users' expectations, the more they will feel insecure. Oops, maybe if I let go of this apple, it will turn into a tomato and jump a mile into the sky."

NY Times: Pop! Goes the Bubble. "There are many more E-sellers than there were before -- a change, almost imperceptible, that is weighing on many Internet stocks today."

Saturday, May 29, 1999

Chuck Shotton: "What the Internet needs is a set of true peer-to-peer applications that run on the client side. Until that happens, the old client-server model will continue to be a barrier to any sort of meaningful distributed or decentralized computing on the Internet." Not sure if I agree, but it sounds good!

US Subs: It started as a very simple idea. "The boat sits at the dock because I just can't seem to find the time to use it anymore." "Waterfront property is too expensive." "I don't have as much time as I'd like to go diving."

Friday, May 28, 1999

DaveNet: Weblogs. "Right now a very small percentage of web users have websites. That can and will change."

The Freedom Ship will continuously circle the globe, covering most of the world's coastal regions every 2 years. It will spend 25% of its time in motion, and 75% sitting offshore exciting touring destinations. I love the web!

US Patent and Trademark Office: Notice of Public Hearing and Request for Comments on Issues Related to the Identification of Prior Art During the Examination of a Patent Application.

Privacy is a big topic on the Internet today. In September 1997, in DaveNet, Bill Gates said: "For some reason the public isn't hearing about this issue at all. I can't believe there isn't more of an outcry." Finally people are tuning in. They are recording everything you say. It can and will be used against you. "A new cyberdictator could ask his MIS department to do a query against the email database. Find me six million people to kill, and give me a reason to kill them."

Salon: Fear of Links. "The webloggers have found a new and fertile niche in the Web's information ecology. They're fulfilling the predictions by Internet visionaries of the rise of a new breed of personal journalism online -- only instead of pounding the physical pavement, they forage for news on the Net itself." Beautiful!

Drew Ivan: 'Back in 1945, Vannevar Bush's landmark essay "As We May Think" described a device called Memex that sounds a lot like today's Worldwide Web. He envisioned a class of people called Trailblazers who were adept at wading their way through hypertexts and leaving a trail of links for others to follow. Weblogs are to the WWW what Trailblazers were to Memex, except not hypothetical.'

On Monday we registered a new domain, it's amazing what names aren't taken.

Wired: Feasting on Failed Promise. "The consensus is we're about to hit a boom in the insolvency industry. The laws of gravity are taking hold."

Jamis: "It was 10:00 on a moonless night as we rattled along in Magdie's ancient Peugeot at 70 mph. The glowing tip of a cigarette drifted by in the adjacent lane and I thought drowsily that the car along side of us on the freeway didn't have any headlights either."

Andreessen: "We have to make this stuff much more simple at every step of the chain." Agreed.

Now more than ever I wish Microsoft would improve the text editor built into MSIE. I've tried to explain this to them so many different ways. Here's the straight poop. The editor sucks. If you want to see what I mean, get a HotMail account and use it write all your email for a couple of days. You'll hate it. Make it so you don't.

Wired: "The government has turned Australia into the global village idiot", said Danny Yee, a spokesman for Electronic Frontiers Australia in a statement.

Standard: Perlman Steps Down at WebTV. "Microsoft plans to replace the core WebTV operating software with the Windows CE system, a move that will make WebTV a key part of Microsoft's high-stakes entry into the interactive-TV space."

InfoWorld: "XML.org will provide a registry and repository for the access and management of XML schemas, Document Type Definitions (DTD), and other XML-related information."

News.com: Taking Sides in XML. "What XML proponents fear most is that the major software makers will use their financial clout to hijack the consensus-building process, leading to proprietary and incompatible versions of XML schemas that favor a particular vendor's software and architecture."

NY Times: AOL Volunteers Sue for Pay. "AOL is a for-profit business. What community leaders did was very essential to the service in terms of what they were selling to the public. The minimum-wage laws require people get paid a minimum wage."

Jude Wanniski: Let's Kill Some Civilians. "Senator Lieberman is such a sweet man, with such a sweet voice and demeanor. His colleagues all marvel at what a spiritual fellow he is.."

Publish reviews PhotoScripter 1.0, which adds scripting to Adobe PhotoShop/Mac. "But my biggest beef with PhotoScripter is its pricing. A single-user license is $299, while a workstation license (which allows the plug-in to be placed on a server and accessed by up to ten people) is $999."

Huh? $299 is a bargain! There's a huge need for this product, and Adobe has been unresponsive for eight years! What's the reviewer's reasoning? He doesn't say. That people's time is worthless? Scripting PhotoShop has been on the professional's wish list for eight years. Now an independent developer has delivered. They should have a parade for MainEvent instead of complaining about, of all things, the price! What do PhotoShop professionals earn?

Frontier 6 developers, there's a new release of prefs.root today. The demo site for the new features is kind of funky and interesting in a technical sort of way.

Tuesday, May 25, 1999

Salon: Stalking the Wild Fry's Salesperson. 'In the unlikely event they were caught, they behaved like prisoners of war, meeting customer's interrogations with elaborate obfuscation, misdirection,

hedging or outright lies. But by far the most common response was "Sorry, this is my first day."'

eBay: "I want to open a scuba shop in the Keys. I'm selling my house, quitting my job, and may not own a computer again. I will, of course, be available for transition, info, and advice for a few months."

InfoWorld: Microsoft Pitches Visual Basic. "As developers move away from building traditional two-tier programs and begin focusing on distributed, n-tier Web applications, Microsoft wants to make sure that its popular Visual Basic development tool is not left behind."

If you're from Borders or Barnesandnoble, instead of complaining, set up a site that displays info about the books and has three buttons: Buy from Amazon, Buy from Borders and Buy from Barnesandnoble. Make it easy for me to support you.

John Dvorak: The All-Things Approach. "I suppose it's possible that the world's biggest bookstore can become the world's biggest CD store and the world's biggest toy store and the worlds biggest clothing store and.."

Question for people studying the IPO craze. Why has no brand emerged in the Internet Cafe business? Why hasn't one of the 'brick and mortar' brands seized this opportunity? Why hasn't one of the big ISPs? Laptops are great, but what if every Barnes and Noble had several easy to use web browsers? So there Jeff Bezos!

Name withheld: 'I manage all of the non-MVS systems integrators at (a large bank), and I attended several technology briefings last week at HP. I feel that their efforts, in addition to being open, will have a greater long-term impact than BizTalk.'

ZDNET: "BizTalk is more than just the next generation of Microsoft's DNA (Distributed interNet Applications) architecture. It is also the name of a new XML-based BackOffice server that Microsoft will release into beta test this summer and ship sometime shortly after Windows 2000."

XML.COM questions XSL. "How necessary is XSL? Is it just too complicated? Is it really an improvement over what we have today? Might XSL even be considered harmful to the Web?"

Paul Howson: "XSL has been mooted as 'the way' to translate xml. However, XSL is a complex and as-yet-incomplete piece of work. If you’ve read the XSL spec, you may find yourself wondering whether things really need to be that complicated."

At 7AM Pacific a BucksWoodside.Com went live. We did lots of work on the site, mostly behind the scenes, to make the content flow easily. This was an incredible educational process in user interface.

Buck's opening day screenshot. It's always a good idea to do one of these. Over the months and probably years, the interface is likely to change, and probably will get more complex. I wish I had opening day shots for all the sites I've done. Live and learn!

Never demo on a development server. "Learn what makes your software crash, and avoid doing those things! Run through the demonstration over and over, each time you get a new version from development. If the new version doesn't demo without crashing, use an older, more reliable version instead."

News.com: Microsoft Forms Linux Group. Like MacArthur, fresh from his victory over Japan, marching without opposition to the China-Korea border. There's no company to defeat here. No small set of minds to find weaknesses in. Oooops?

It had to happen!www.gluetrain.com. "Markets are conversations. Conversations are markets. Markets are he as you are we and we are all together."

Red Herring: Venture Capitalists Feel the Heat. "As returns on investment into Internet startups continue to skyrocket, venture capitalists are no longer the only investors willing to take a bet on high-risk, out-there technology investments."

Don Hopkins, a member of the SimCity development team, has accumulated a list of recent stories about the project.

I was chatting with Bernie this evening about the project I've been working on and saying that DeepFun.Com was an inspiration for me, and I started talking about admin interfaces. Bernie told me about the one that Matt Daw put together for him, and I asked for a screen shot.

TQ White wrote a Letter to the Editor of the NY Times. They printed it!

NY Times: Internet Datacenters Power the Web. "Internet datacenters are sprouting up across the country in a sure sign of the trend toward once again housing information and computer power centrally -- a seeming reversal of the last two decades of computing."

Interactive Week: Q&A With Jim Phillips. The interesting part is in the Talkback section at the bottom of the page. Apparently this is what happens when a vendor is too agressive with patents. The users get angry. This is how the patent madness should shake out. The predators should fear for their existence at the hands of the users.

Jeffrey Zeldman: "Visually challenged? Not to worry. We got yer graphics – right here. And they're all free." This is the perfect companion site for Scripting News. A bonanza!

Lawrence Lee reports that Microsoft Office 2000 has support for threaded discussion groups. Is the protocol connecting the workstation to the server open? Could we plug a new writing tool into their network? And can we replace their server with one running on Mac OS or Linux?

Sydney Morning Herald: Talk Back to the Web. "We're not going to let Chrysler go on Ford's Web site and post a note," said Mr Tan, acknowledging enforcement may be difficult considering the potential for a vast and growing number of comments.

InfoWorld: Microsoft Embraces other Platforms? "After months of labeling its Windows platform 'the ultimate application server,' Microsoft is partnering with third-party vendors in hopes of giving customers a solution that better fits with their heterogeneous environments."

Faisal Jawdat: "With all due respect to the fantastic accomplishment that Linux represents (both in terms of creating a new operating system 'from scratch' and in terms of creating something significant and usable in Open Source), it's not ready to be my client OS or my server OS for serious work, and the Linux community needs to realize that the leap required is more than a code fix."

Wired asks "Would you want your child to grow up to be Steve Jobs or Bill Gates?"

Kickoff message for our "other" new mail list. An invitation for open source development. A new plan for a distributed portal. Customized content aggregation. Personalization up the yin-yang. Private intranet channels. And dissemination of information thru search engines, pagers and email, printing and of course the Internet.

Jim Byrne would like to get in on the Linux "feeding frenzy". He asks which is the best distribution for PowerPC hardware. Hint to Apple get "Darwin" off your roadmap and jump to Linux.

A spiffy new interface for preferences for UserLand.Com. It's just a wizard. Makes it easy for preferences to grow. And it's a framework, we'll release source code when it's done so every Frontier 6 site can have a great preferences sub-site.

The wizard interface is specified in XML, so non-technical people, tutorial writers, for example, can document the preferences system right in the spec for the system. This puts the power in the right place. Also it's scalable, the same spec could be rendered in Flash, DHTML or as a static web page. All from the same source. I still want to do some more work on this. Stay tuned for more new features.

Wired: When Industries Collide. Tech should hang tough. There's no way copy protection will work. MP3 is here to stay.

MP3.Com had a mole in the London meeting. "Seems that all the suspicions of behind-the-scenes manipulation and not so hidden agendas are true. Despite public claims to an open industry conglomeration of cooperative forces set to solve the world's digital problems, an elite, secret group has been meeting to subvert the process."

David Weekly: Why SDMI Will Fail. "When a computer program, say RealPlayer or WinAMP, wants to play some music for the user, they have to send that data in raw form to the sound card. It is a trivial manner to write a piece of software that pretends that it is a sound card!"

News.com: Motley Fool Won't Rush to IPO. "Our time frame as a business is 60 years, not 60 days," Motley Fool chief operating officer Erik Rydholm told CNET News.com. "We consider an IPO to be a financing event and not an exit strategy, and we don't want financing to be confused with our business goals." Right on!

Wired: US May Pull Belgrade Bandwidth. "People are exposed to bad propaganda on both sides," he said. "The Internet is the only place there's some kind of sanity. It's crucial. At this particular moment it's crucial."

InfoWorld: Buy a product, get some stock. "Cyrus Intersoft plans to give developers who sign up to create applications using its forthcoming Java-based network operating system a lot more than a pat on the back and a free T-shirt -- they will get stock in the company."

Eric Kidd: Zope and Frontier Compared. This becomes more interesting as we move towards Unix. We want to deploy apps that scale up to millions of users. We will use Frontier as a content management and rapid development environment. Until we have Frontier running on Linux, we will deploy in some other environment. If we can build a bridge to Zope, and if its applications scale well on Intel hardware, we'll go with Zope.

Key point: We made a decision last month that we should not wait for Frontier to get to Unix. We can't really, because we can't turn away users. Mail To The Future, for example, is growing, there's more press coming, following the Yahoo endorsement. And eventually I think My.UserLand.Com is going to develop into a major Internet portal. We won't hold the apps back waiting for Frontier to get to Linux. Some people may be surprised at this flexibility, but many of our customers need this kind of bridge too. The Web is growing at a feverish pace, you can't be in a position where you have to turn away growth.

TechWeb: 25 Vendors in Hosted Apps Consortium. Interesting! There's room for another 25 vendors here. I like XML, Linux, NT, scripting and databases. ASPs is a cool idea. I like it.

Today's music: A Certain Girl by Naomi Neville, as sung by Allen Toussaint, of course! What's her name? I can't tell you!

Wired: What If Aliens Cloned My Hair? "The company that launched the remains of Timothy Leary wants to send a lock of your hair hurtling into space." So if 25,000 years from now an alien cloned my hair, would my consciousness be there?

SJ Merc: The Dead on MP3. "Spokesmen for the Grateful Dead announced Tuesday that the band will let its fans legally swap online recordings of live performances." Garcia once said, "When we're done with it, you can have it."

DeadRadio: "Due to licensing issues and restrictions this content is no longer available. Please visit www.broadcast.com for your favorite radio station." Hello?

News.com: Net number system at crossroads. "The legacy space doled out to those that had the foresight to ask for it is the source of jealousy for many latecomers. They point out that while Mercedes Benz holds nearly 17 million addresses, only 1.04 million have been allocated to the entire nation of China."

We need help with COM. Rather than broadcast this via email at all the microsoft.com addresses I have, I thought I'd try posting it here. Brent is working on a breakthru application of COM. We think it's going to help set a new standard for ease of use in website writing. But we need some guidance from Microsoft. Brent works in Seattle, so we could move quickly.

It's still important to get XML-RPC support in all the major environments on all major OSes. We have Python, Perl, Java, and of course Frontier. It's a platform-vendorless cross-platform, lightweight, Internet-based distributed computing protocol. And it's fun!

Tuesday, May 11, 1999

I am now officially no longer a Linux virgin. I have Red Hat 6.0 running on 206.204.24.10. The installation wasn't that bad. Now to read more docs and figure out how to browse the file system and get some real web pages up.

Twelve days ago I posted a story about bad service from Dell on a simple repair for my laptop. They promised 72-hour turnaround at the beginning. It's now approx 417 hours later and we're no closer to having a working system. This is impacting my business. Dell had a stellar reputation with me for service, now it's falling apart. They can't make a simple repair, what can I count on them for? I paid a premium, as a business user with limited time, to protect against exactly this kind of foul-up.

Mark Kennedy, a team member at The Motley Fool, wants to move his RSS file. A reasonable request. Now we have to come up with a mechanism to update the service list. In my proposal, which I brought to the XML-DEV list, I want to implement a new tag. Read the proposal and discussion here.

Cameron Martin has an IE5-only browser for the RSS files on My.UserLand.Com. I tried it and it doesn't work here, but he says it's "Very Alpha" so that explains it as far as I'm concerned.

If any Scripting News readers are at WWDC, I hearby invite them to post reports, impressions, gossip, strange sitings, etc.

The Standard: NBC Buys Xoom. "The new venture, to be called NBC Internet, combines the Snap.com venture of CNET and NBC with Xoom.com and NBC Interactive, which includes NBC.com."

MSNBC: Lycos Deal Dead? "USA Networks Inc, stymied by stiff shareholder opposition to its agreement to buy Lycos Inc, is expected to abandon its three-month-long bid to acquire the Internet company, according to people familiar with the matter."

InfoWorld: NAI is releasing Versions 6.5 of both PGP Enterprise Security and PGP Command Line, to allow encryption of information in common batch files and on several new platforms, including mainframes, FTP servers, and Web servers.

BBC: Surviving on the Net. "They are locked in a secret central London youth hostel - their only contact with the outside world is via e-mails and online user groups. They will have to get everything they need - from underwear to food and drink - by ordering it on the Net."

MacInTouch reports improvements to AppleScript in Mac OS 8.6, to be released today. It will have an external script scheduler app and the ability to do GETs and PUTs (it's not clear if it's HTTP or FTP or both). Frontier has had a built-in scheduler since 1992 and full net functionality since 1996.

Are you using or developing for Windows CE? If so, what is it? Even if you think you don't care, you should. There are going to be millions of these boxes on the Internet. What kind of content do they handle? How interactive are they? Why aren't they using WebTV which we already know how to make content for? Or are they using WebTV?? What's the content developer story for Windows CE?

Jaron Lanier: Making an Ally of Piracy. "The easier it is to copy music, the less of a threat piracy will become. When piracy gets easier, professional pirates have less to offer. The only pirates left will be fans. And there are lots of ways to make money from fans."

I'm making a trip to Fry's today to get a copy of Linux and Adobe ImageReady. I'm going to try the Sunnyvale store today, I hear it's better than the Palo Alto store. Wish me luck. (Of course Fry's doesn't have a website, so I'm still trying to figure out where the Sunnyvale store is.)

Eric Kidd: "The Declaration of Independence is the philosophy of the United States government, and the Constitution is the actual implementation."

More Eric Kidd: "Having known the Swiss, I'd hate to be on the wrong end of their righteous indignation. I know how they feel about litter, shoplifting and loud noises after 10PM, and an invasion would probably qualify as all three."

People are raving about the new iCab browser for the Mac. Hey, does anyone know any of the developers of iCab? If so, I'd love to get this message to them. Microsoft supports an embeddable web browser control on Windows. The Mac needs this too. Microsoft said they aren't going to do it for the Mac. How about a DLL we can link to from Frontier?

This morning I'm listening to the music of Aaron Copland. It's inspiring springtime music!

Tim Bray: "I moderated a presentation they did at XTech'99. It's Microsoft-driven, they're trying to build a protocol so that all the computer systems you need to run a school can talk to each other. When the kid signs in, he gets his library card auto-magically. It's all done with XML, loosely-coupled message interchange. Reason it might work is that it's not hard to cook up a vocabulary that describes everything you need to know about elementary school students. They claimed, loudly and repeatedly, that it was completely vendor-agnostic and not tied to Windows. Reasonable people will be suspicious, but the concept seemed sound."

Heidi Roizen is this week's Big Thinker on ZDNet. She's going places, she hasn't started telling her next story yet. Stay tuned, don't touch that dial!

Wired: Be files for IPO. "Due to our financial position as of December 31, 1998, and absent the raising of additional funds, our independent accountants have expressed substantial doubt regarding our ability to continue as a going concern," reads the prospectus.

Bobby is a web-based tool that analyzes web pages for their accessibility to people with disabilities. Michael Gilbert tested 200 sites focused on disabilities. 65 percent fail the Bobby test.

MacWEEK: Gone but not forgotten. "Unlike Painter, which managed to carve itself a niche as complement of Photoshop, Live Picture never had that luck. Every potential user seemed to mistake it for a Photoshop clone."

This could be the moment the Internet stock bubble bursts. I had this idea myself, I thought about offering stock to Scripting News readers. It's the logical conclusion of the Internet stock mania. If each user has so much value, why not let the user benefit from that value. Eventually the contradiction must get resolved. This site is the most concise explanation of the bubble.

Wired: American Idiotics. "It didn't take Washington politicians very long to respond to reports that the Littleton, Colorado, killers had their own Web sites. Last week top Justice Department official Eric Holder said he'd like to see new regulations controlling how Americans use the Internet, and President Clinton warned of its dangers."

Here's an item for cluetrain.com. The reason the political leaders push the 'net needs control' story is so that they can keep encryption from being universal. They love the fact that they can read every email you send or receive, and that they can monitor all your web activity. That's why Al Gore loves the Internet. It's the ultimate political control weapon, if he and his friends own it. Their 'regulations' will never pass the constitutionality test, and they know it. The real issue is encryption.

Red Herring: Lucent Bets on Net Conferencing. "Persystant will need to break through many barriers to get Internet data- and voice-conferencing accepted in corporate America, according to Ms. Hale. Bandwidth, security, and psychological issues have all slowed the adoption of the Internet-based conferencing systems."

Red Herring: Goldman Sachs Dims Net IPOs. "Over the past month, any Internet IPO that hit the market was bound for the IPO Hall of Fame, with an opening-day gain of one hundred percent or better guaranteed. Not today."

NY Times: Record Label Rushes to Get on Internet. "The demand is there, and demand is being filled now by independent labels and illegal content," Kenswil said. "It's crazy for us to not recognize demand and move."

CNN: Poll says violence in media should be regulated. "Most Americans think the federal government should do more to regulate violence on TV, in movies, in music, on the Internet and in video games, although the greatest support comes for increased government regulation of the Internet." Americans are idiots.

Benoit Cazenave, a Frenchman, thanks Americans for developing the Internet. Of course I believe there are some Americans who are not idiots, but as a group, measured by the polls, we are. Al Gore talks about the Wisdom of the American People. Pfui! I think the American people, collectively, are about as wise as a bored four year-old.

Wired: SEC Chairman To Investors -- Get a Clue. "To investors: Don't be idiots. To online brokers: Don't prey on the idiots. To regulators: Don't draft heavy-handed laws to protect the idiots from themselves." The idiots are everywhere today.

MSNBC: Cuba Stomps Baltimore, 12-6. "The Orioles, whose AL-worst 7-17 record belies their payroll of more than $78 million, were completely outplayed by a team whose players make a total of about $2,250."

As you may know, Netscape bundles our Mac IdleTime INIT with Communicator. This has been a huge annoyance and distraction for us, as people send us emails blaming it for all kinds of system ills. However, today, Virginia Lindsey reports a real problem with the way Netscape is using IdleTime. This is a support issue for Netscape.

Wired: MS cheated in DOS war. "What the guy is supposed to do is feel uncomfortable, and when he has bugs, suspect that the problem is DR-DOS and then go out to buy MS-DOS," Brad Silverberg, a Microsoft executive, allegedly wrote in a 1992 email cited by Caldera.

InfoWorld: Foes tee off on Microsoft. "Solaris is the New York Yankees," Bernard said. "NT is the Taiwan little leaguers. Solaris is Niagra Falls; NT is a spring mist." Go get em Bill!

Wired: MP3.COM signs Tori Amos and Alanis Morissette. "The report says Morissette will post songs on MP3.com that were recorded live on her tour, and that she may take a stake in the young company." This is how it will happen.

Wired: Never Mind. "In March, Tom Petty released a song from his Echo album -- Free Girl Now -- on MP3.com. But the MP3 file was taken down after two days because Warner Brothers had not approved the promotion. The song was downloaded more than 150,000 times before it was removed, however."

Monday, May 03, 1999

New Media interviews literary agent John Brockman. "So describe for me your idea of a new site devoted to cutting-edge thinking. The person who understands this best is Dave Winer." Thanks!

Bob Metcalfe: "I urge that ICANN abolish all but the geographical top-level domains, letting each country administer its own DNS servers under its own trademark laws."

Rocky Mountain News: Simpler Domain Names? RMI.net's system adds the dot before the final three characters in a company's name. Holiday Inn's simplified domain -- holiday.inn -- would be all a surfer would need to type to find Holiday Inn's site.

BusinessWeek: Can Backweb Soar? "Push, as we knew it two years ago, is dead. But the concept and the technology are alive, and maybe well, under a new guise."

Cringely: Hate.Com. "There are more Eric Harris' in more places like Littleton. Their Web pages absorb emotional energy that might instead go into killing people. These cries for help can be easily found with a search engine and a peer counselor. In this sense, the Internet is part of the solution, not the problem. Why would we ever want to shut these pages down?"

Lightyear Media has personal web server software for the Newton. This is an example of a Fractional Horsepower HTTP Server. People make fun of this idea, they're silly to do so, shows their ignorance, because HTTP is a powerful protocol, and it doesn't just have to be applied in the traditional client-server model.

Christoph Pingel reports that they have the same security problem with domain name registration reported yesterday by Charlie Jackson, in Germany.

NY Times: Parents Fears about the Internet. What a crock. The web did its job in the Littleton case, giving Harris the outlet for his ideas. The parents and police didn't read the website, that was the failure.

News.com: Merchants pull out of Amazon Auctions. "Like eBay, Amazon allows auction participants to post comments about both buyers and sellers, although only feedback from those who complete transactions with an auctioneer can influence their 'star' rating. Nevertheless, knowing that anyone could post commentary about Cameraworld.com, regardless of whether they'd done business with the retailer, worried chief executive Alessandro Mina."

ABC: What's Up With Domain Name Database? "The registry information is our proprietary information," says NSI spokesman Chris Clough. "We’ve been providing it free to the community, but under the contract, all of the intellectual property gathered through the InterNIC process is our proprietary information."

I've been emailing privately with several people exchanging ideas for working past the current NSI-centric domain name system.

LibGD is a Frontier graphics extension (DLL) for creating and manipulating images in GIF format. Mac and Windows.

Bruce Hoult is an app developer, and prefers Macintosh for a variety of interesting reasons.

An edited version of an email I sent to a friend, a creative guy who wants to join an Internet startup, on how to go about it. Lessons learned over a long time, and freshened with new reality checks with Silicon Valley venture capitalists.

Arm-twisting 101. I'm trying to get Marc Canter to release the source code that allows MSIE5 to communicate via XML-RPC with UserLand's servers. I'm doing it gently, but being firm.

News.com: Linux is Fun. Torvalds said civilization has developed to the point where survival is often taken is taken for granted. Consequently, "if you're not interested in doing something, you probably won't do it."